CORBA vs. XML (was: Re: XML.COM: How I Learned to Love daBomb)

[Brendan Macmillan <bren@mail.csse.monash.edu.au>]

> > The technology is no different, practically, to CORBA. Nothing will really
> change, just a new set of tools will be sold, is all :-)
> 
> In practical terms, SOAP and XML-RPC are different from CORBA because the
> technology is so bare-bones that it can be understood and deployed in a
> couple of hours by anyone with a modest scripting background. That's why
> it's catching on.

Has anyone published a point-by-point comparison between CORBA and SOAP/XML-RPC?

Obviously, using XML makes it human readable; but I think the biggest
difference is that the latter two are merely method invocation (and that's
*easy*); while CORBA implements "remote objects", and the horror of issues like
maintaining state, remote memory management etc and so on.

Have I got that right?

Stateful objects turned out to scale terribly, so it was all a waste of effort
anyway.  The simpler, less powerful approach of mere method invocation is
actually much better.

In principle, web services are no different from any other TCP/IP service (like
ping, telnet, ftp, etc etc etc) except that they use XML, and have a more
general way of specifying the method to be invoked... whereas CORBA is (was?)
*much* more ambitious.

It's a bit like how Java simplified the pointers of C, and the OO of C++, to
make something that was a *lot* simpler and less error prone, and (by the 80-20
rule) sufficiently powerful 80% of the time...

But I really would like to see a point-by-point comparison, if anyone has done
one, or knows of one (or would like to do one now).  ;-)


Cheers,
Brendan
-- 
e:  bren@mail.csse.monash.edu.au                    v:  +61 (3)  9905 1502
Email is checked daily                              Phone is rarely attended